Rankelle

Buried deep in the site

This page is five or more clicks from the homepage. Pages that far down get crawled less often and are treated as less important.

How to fix it

Link to it from a more prominent page, or restructure navigation so it sits closer to the top.

When it is not a problem

Depth is a fact about internal linking rather than about the URL. A page four folders deep in the path can be one click from the homepage, and that page is not buried.

How Rankelle handles it

  • SeverityInformational. Often correct as it stands, and reported so you can see the pattern rather than so you can clear it.
  • DetectionDetected on a single page while crawling it, then grouped with the other pages under the same URL pattern.
  • GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question.
  • LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
  • VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing.

Try it on your own site, free

No card, and the free tier does not expire — the first verdict takes about six weeks to arrive.